1.1 Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to means and a method for automatically generating a provisioning process the provisioning process being capable to install software components on a target computer system.
1.2 Description and Disadvantages of Prior Art
A new area of technology with increasing importance is the domain of On-Demand computing. On-demand computing deals with providing IT services the same easy way as utility companies, such as electrical companies, are providing their services. A requestor would simply state the request and the companies providing the services would make them available very quickly. A typical request could look like the following: Please give me 50 four-way processors with 1000 GB storage. Each processor should run IBM WebSphere as an application server and IBM DB2 as the underlying relational database. And this should be available by end of next week. The provider of such a service then needs to setup this environment rather quickly. First, it has to find the set of processors including the disk storage. Second it has to deploy the requested software onto the selected processors. The complete set of components that can be deployed is described via one or more product trees which identify the components and their dependencies. An administrator selects the components that need to be installed. Based on the selection made by the administrator a provisioning manager determines which components need to be installed in which sequence on which processor.
Therefore new technologies are required to simplify and to accelerate the development of provisioning managers.
1.3 Objective of the Invention
The invention is based on the objective to provide a technology for automatically generating a provisioning manager being capable to install a software component on a target computer system.